Not as smooth as it sounds

"Glissando suggests something smooth, soaring and elegant but this is bumpy and messy, with all its seams and frayed edges showing..." You can read my review of this new site-specific work by Candida Powell-Williams here.

http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/2427879

25 July - 1 September 2012
Salisbury Arts Centre,  Bedwin Street, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP1 3UT
www.salisburyartscentre.co.uk

www.candidapowell-williams.com

Busy doing close to nothing

Compelling, if a little reverential: Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012) is a documentary film that follows the Serbian performance artist as she prepares for a retrospective of her work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

As the blurb says 'the hardest thing to do is something which is close to nothing'. We see Abramovic's new work for the show, which consists of sitting face to face with audience members one by one. It's partly human interaction at its most basic and moving, part endurance test - as she carries out this activity all day, six days a week, for the entire duration of the show (around ten weeks). Shown at Exeter Picturehouse this week. Here's a trailer. Recommended.

Everywhere and nowhere

I've been a citizen of Nowhereisland (or Nowhereian, as we seem to be called) for almost a year. For anyone not familiar with Alex Hartley's project, its starting point was a piece of land in the High Arctic that was revealed by the melting of a retreating glacier. Material from the island was loaded on to a barge, sailed into international waters and declared a new nation on 20th September 2011. It's since been the focal point for a year-long conversation between all sorts of people about ideas such as utopia, citizenship, territory, nationhood and environment. Now in its last days, it's working its way around the Southwest peninsula, mooring off the coast while its mobile embassy gets to work engaging with the public.

I really I bought into the idea of Nowhereisland - but for most of the year that's all it's been: an idea. I was looking forward to an encounter with some real people and real stuff in Torquay, where the project spent Monday and Tuesday.  It's fun: the island sitting in the sea and a converted horsebox on the shore looking a bit like a jolly icecream kiosk, with happy crowds around it. The kiosk is the Nowhereisland embassy - and it's a real cabinet of curiosities, beautifully made, with lots of drawers and cupboards and racks containing documentation, souvenirs, rock samples, glacial melt water, wellington boots, photos of polar bears, and books and records related to the idea of nowhere and islands.

Nowhereisland has impressive credentials and there's lots to admire about it. But I get no sense of the excitement Alex Hartley must have felt when he first saw the possibility of claiming new land. The vision that set this whole thing in motion seems almost forgotten under an accumulation of details and engagement strategies. It won my mind but it hasn't won my heart.

Nowhereisland by Alex Hartley is a Situations project, one of 12 Artists Taking the Lead projects across the UK, funded by the Arts Council of England, which form part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad in summer 2012.

http://nowhereisland.org/
http://situations.org.uk

Feeling over function

Michael Samuels Tragedy of the Commons (2012)

I can't help feeling that Spacex's current show - This Was Tomorrow -  actually belongs 45 miles west in Plymouth. That city's status as the greatest built example of post-war planning and architecture seems a more fitting backdrop for these works by Michael Samuels, which look back playfully to the ideals of Modernism.

Housed in Spacex's converted 19th century warehouse at the more boho end of Exeter, the work seems instead to reference the local vintage and junk stores. Precisely constructed from fragments of modern furniture (lots of G-plan), along with speaker cabinets, anglepoise lamps, G-clamps and ratchet straps, the materials for this work could easily have been sourced from nearby shops.

While I try to keep my focus on the work's formal qualities, I'm actually feeling nostalgia. I'm seeing bits of my grandma's Formica-topped table and the dark-wood wall cabinets favoured by my ageing parents-in-law. Not to beat about the bush: these are sculptures made from dead people's furniture. It gives them a poignancy that is compelling, but possibly unhelpful in relation to the artist's clever investigation of formal, material and spatial qualities. Nonetheless, it's a wonderful show.

The largest gallery space, windows closed off to create a claustrophobic cave, is home to Tragedy of the Commons, a monster construction of modular furniture, which - exceeding domestic scale - becomes architectural in its impact. Its title refers to an ecological/economic theory which suggests individuals will inevitably destroy a shared resource. The UK's post-war legacy of run-down tower blocks, echoed here, seems to underline its truth.

Michael Samuels: This Was Tomorrow  28 July - 15 September 2012
Spacex, 45 Preston Street, Exeter EX1 1DF
www.spacex.org.uk

Digital dates

Just announced. The results of the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission, which gave 30 artists the opportunity to work with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University, will be on show between 16th November 2012 and 19th January 2013. Now all I have to do is get my object made...
http://www.exeterphoenixdigital.org.uk/2012DAC.php

Culture crash

Oliver Flexman's Operations in the Contact Zone, which opened last week at Exeter Phoenix, offers a knowing take on the often absurd mismatch that can occur when translating from culture to culture. As human beings, we have more in common than we often think, but the subtleties of branding and labelling also highlight the differences.

The whole show is as slick, glossy and assured as the branding it reflects. My favourite piece is two huge, faded shop fascias from the Gulf. Though they once sat on two sides of a corner site advertising the same restaurant, the images are now placed back to back over a light box. On one side it reads Prince’s Restaurant the other Princesses Restaurant. The installation is brilliant: the object looks as if it's crashed onto the gallery floor from on high and propped itself on a piece of municipal street furniture.

Operations in the Contact Zone, 20 July - 30 August 2012
Exeter Phoenix Galleries, Gandy Street, Exeter

http://www.oliverflexman.com

www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art

Putting the open in open studios

Proof that South West open studios are finally acknowledging the importance of non-saleable work:  Somerset Art Weeks (15th-30th September 2012) supports a number of recognisably contemporary entries. There's a gallery in a phone box curated by Peter Messa, a pop-up museum by Hacker Farm and curated detritus from OSR Projects. I'm hoping these artists didn't have to pay the same entry fee as artists who stand to generate income from the event.
www.somersetartworks.org.uk